Help Wanted - Fishers of Men

In an email newsletter from Karl Keating to which I apparently subscribe (I can't remember why...) is news of a tabulation someone has done on the priest-in-training situation in the US.
I remember being quite struck by the numbers and fervour of the young men I met at Mundelein. It seems my vague impression that the Archdiocese was, comparably speaking, thriving in that respect, was accurate.

In America, [from 1978, the year that John Paul II was elected pope, to2005, the year that Benedict XVI was elected pope,] the number of seminarians dropped from 9,021 to 4,603, a decline of 49 percent.
That is the countrywide statistic.
Statistics for individual dioceses vary.
Some actually have seen steady increases in the number of seminarians, but they have been the exceptions, of course.
In December, Catholic World Report magazine printed a tabulation of the ratio of Catholics to seminarians in all 176 Latin Rite dioceses in the U.S. Religious-order seminarians were not counted. The raw numbers were taken from The Official Catholic [Kenedy] Directory.
The magazine took the number of Catholics, divided that by the number of diocesan seminarians, and ended up with a ratio. Then it ranked the dioceses and listed the rankings for 2006 (the latest year available) with those for the three prior years.
You might not be surprised to learn that Lincoln, Nebraska, was in first place for the third year running, with a ratio of 2,473 Catholics per seminarian.
...Most of the top-ranking dioceses are small or smallish, and their rankings may not tell us much, either about them or about the state of the Church in America as a whole.
More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that few large dioceses score high. Of the top 40 rankings, only two are held by dioceses with Catholic populations above 150,000: Denver (400,000 Catholics) and St. Paul-Minneapolis (650,000 Catholics).
Most populous dioceses are found toward the bottom of the list: Boston at 162 out of 176; Brooklyn at 155; Detroit at 160; Galveston-Houston at 164; Los Angeles at 171; New York at 170; Orange at 156; Philadelphia at 144; Rockville Centre at 163; San Bernardino at 159. All of these dioceses have a Catholic population exceeding one million.

The only million-plus dioceses doing fairly well are Newark at 78 and Chicago at 42.

My own diocese of San Diego doesn't quite make the million-Catholic cut-off; it had 950,743 Catholics in 2006. But it did achieve a certain distinction. In the rankings it came in dead last at 176 out of 176.